LONDON.  The first thing that strikes you as you come into London after five
years is the incredible increase in automobile traffic. Not only are the main
thoroughfares jam-packed bumper to bumper all day long and most of the night, but
the side streets, most of them now one-way, are completely taken up with the
overflow.

Streets that seem to go nowhere, as do most London side streets,
nevertheless have been organized into interconnecting systems of one-way
subthoroughfares, and even little streets like Bedford Place, which goes only
one block from Bloomsbury Square to Russell Square and in the middle of which
cats used to sun themselves undisturbed, are now crowded with cars trying to
briefly bypass the congestion.

As we arrived, Barbara Castle (what a cinematic name for a
minister of transport! but shes one of the worlds smartest girls) chose a New
York newspaper interview to announce that she was hoping to solve Londons
traffic problem with some radical surgery.

This threw the English press into a terrible flap  even the
Labor press, which agreed with her, felt it was most unpatriotic of a government
spokesman to let the Yanks scoop the home papers.

She is thinking of adopting the road pricing system, based on
the findings of the Smeed Committee, which recently completed an exhaustive and
objective survey of the whole problem.

Drivers would be taxed as they drive, like cabs. London would be
divided into zones, from the center to the suburbs, with the classification
changing according to the time of day.

The driver would pay not by distance, but by time, the rate
varying between two-tenths of a penny and tuppence a minute. This rate would be
recorded on a kind of taximeter, with a light to show when it is working. It is
quite possible to work the entire zoning and metering system automatically and
electronically.

It sounds terribly complicated, but the Smeed Report, which our
own city authorities should read, and which goes into the matter with great
thoroughness and discusses all the technical possibilities at length, is in the
end convincing.

Such a system is rationing by price, but so are gasoline, rubber
and cars themselves. Rationing by price, they arent free.

Any system of permits, with categories of unessential,
essential, absolutely essential, would be too rigid, with no provision for
emergencies, and would be open to the abuses of an immense bureaucracy.

The Smeed Report is obtainable from either the Ministry of
Transport, or, I think, Her Majestys Stationers Office  ask the British
Consulate.

Everybody interested in the problem and certainly everybody in
authority in San Francisco should study it.

Footnote: I stood on Southampton Row at 5:15 p.m. and observed
the crawling cars, worse even than on Fell and Oak Streets in San Francisco.
Between one car in eight and one in nine had more than the single
occupant-driver. Khrushchev was so right!

LONDON.  How good it is to be in London again. The terrible congestion, the
new skyscrapers, the hamburger joints, all the other awful things that have
happened since I was here last cant spoil it . . . as similar
aggiornamento has come pretty close to destroying Paris.

One thing, the national and local governments have embarked on a
smoke and smog abatement program which has already made the difference. I guess
if they hadnt everybody would have died.

Most startling, we went first off, after a visit to the British
Museum, to the Museum Tavern for lunch. The mixed grill, one of the best in
London, was gone from the menu, as were other concoctions like shepherds pie.
So I had a grilled chop and a pint of bitter. Mary asked for tea. We dont
serve tea, only coffee, say they. No cheeseburgers, anyway  though theyre
readily obtainable in Wimpy Shops. Actually, they were invented in Cologne,
where theyve been called half a hen for all my lifetime.

Next to my tailors on Southampton Row, what should we discover
but Indica, a sort of City Lights bookshop abroad, and the clearing house for
Way-Out London. Prominently displayed, what were there but the works of Kenneth
Rexroth  along with Ferlinghetti, McClure, Lamantia, Duncan, and most of the
publications of the Free Poetry Movement and the IWW Poets Local. It was just
like Haight-Ashbury.

Went to see Loot at the Cochran Theater down the street
 things seem to be moving back to Bloomsbury from Chelsea, Notting Hill and
other seacoasts of Bohemia  actually, those places are now full up with
Way-Out and the overflow is washing back to the haunts of Middleton Murray, Nina
Hamnet, Augustus Johns, and Wyndham Lewis.

Anyway, if Loot is avant-garde theater Ive lost track
somewhere. It is a straight situation comedy that might have been written by
Dion Boucicault, or Plautus for that matter. Funny with a savage mockery of all
British virtues  but the British have been making fun of themselves this way
since the 16th century and it has done them little good.

Next, a big bash for the new paper, the International Times
 IT. The editors announce themselves as part of the Underground Press
Syndicate, along with the East Village Other, the Los Angeles Free
Press, Peace News, the Berkeley Barb, The Paper. As
Indica is a physical clearing house for Way-Out London, so IT plans to be a
printed one, with news of whats happening in Bob Dylans sense.

The bash was something else. It was held in the Roundhouse by
the Chalk Farm tube station, and was another of those long-distance reconstructions
of the Fillmore Auditorium.

The bands didnt show, so there was a large pickup band of
assorted instruments on a small central platform. Sometimes they were making
rhythmic sounds, sometimes not.

The place is literally an old roundhouse, with the doors for the
locomotives all boarded up and the tracks and turntable gone, but still with a
dirt floor (or was it just very dirty?). The only lights were three spotlights. The single entrance and
exit was through a little wooden door about three feet wide, up a narrow wooden
stair, turning two corners, and along an aisle about 2-1/2 feet wide made by
nailing down a long table.

Eventually about 3500 people crowded past this series of
inflammable obstacles.

I felt exactly like I was on the Titanic. Far be it from
me to holler copper, but I was dumfounded that the London police and fire
authorities permitted even a dozen people to congregate in such a trap. Mary and
I left as early as we politely could.

Next, the Royal Shakespeare Companys production of US, a
play about Vietnam on which they had been working for months. It managed to
anger almost everybody. Time magazine considered it anti-American, the
British Far Left, or at least the Maoist contingent, considered in pro-American;
the ordinary Left and Liberal critics considered it equivocal and disappointing.
The squares considered it incomprehensible.

Actually, though it is certainly anti-Johnson, anti-napalm,
anti-hypocrisy and sadism, it is not anti-American. The pun, U.S.-us is
intended to bring home the direct personal involvement of each individual
Englishman  or any other member of the audience — in an international tragedy of
uncontrollable proportions.

Only the theatrically innocent take sides when witnessing
Hamlet or Oedipus, but although war is essential a tragedy of mans
predisposition to evil choices, the most lethal manifestation of original sin,
it is doubtful if the stage can de-politicize a current war to the extent that
we are purged of pity and terror.

They certainly tried. The cast and staff went into a kind of
retreat for months. Yet the results seemed to satisfy none of the critics. Due to
some failure to sharpen the moral focus, all the immense amount of theatrical
ingenuity fell apart into a series of gimmicks.

However, I prophesy that US will come to the U.S. and be
immensely popular  in America. It will seem a forthright yet ultramodern
indictment of Johnson the Seconds East Asia policy and enough people share that
attitude to make up large audiences.

LONDON.  The Issue of Issues in Britain at this moment and likely to be for
many moments to come is the new wages, incomes and prices policy. If properly
organized and implemented, this will be a long stride into the unknown regions of
a controlled capitalist economy, something unknown in peace time.

However, that is not the real, practical, bread-and-butter
reason for the October wage and price freeze or for the insistence of the
government on controls for at least a year. The real reason is the White House and those old bugaboos, the
international bankers. As the American economy heats up more and more every day,
fired not only by the Vietnam war, but by the inflationary heat of an
ever-growing gross national product, wage rate and rate of profit, it throws all
other economies out of kilter.

It is not misgovernment alone that accounts for the fiscal chaos
that has overwhelmed nations like Uruguay, Brazil and Argentina, it is the
disruption of the local economy by the American market.

You would think that the place to apply therapeutic measures of
freeze, controlled deflation, or at least caution, would be at the source of the
trouble, the United States itself.

On the contrary, the White House has so far been committed to a
policy of forced deflation abroad and inflation at home, controlled only by the
gentle taps of the Federal Reserve System.

Most interesting is the response of the intellectuals and
white-collar classes in the Labor Party  the Fabian Left best represented by
the weekly, the New Statesman. They welcome the freeze and the wage
policy as a chance to introduce what they call socialism, but which sounds
suspiciously like economic totalitarianism, the national syndicalism about
which Mussolinis theoreticians were always writing, but which in fact Fascism
was never able to put into effect.

This should occasion no surprise to anyone familiar with the
Fabian Society from its inception. The university-educated salariat in the
ranks of Labor has always been at cross-purposes with the trades unions and the
working class.

Shaw was a passionate admirer of Stalin, Mussolini, and, until
he became unfashionable, Hitler. As for Beatrice and Sydney Webb, Fabianisms leading
theoreticians  two typewriters that beat as one as somebody called them 
they wrote perhaps the silliest book ever written, The Soviet Constitution
in two volumes, an enthusiastic approval and detailed analysis of a document
which was never intended by Stalin to be anything but a diversion  to use
his language.

This does not mean that the New Statesman and its
parliamentary followers are Communists  it means they share with Lenin a
profound distrust of the working class, a conviction that we know best and a
schoolmasterish emotional predisposition to authoritarianism.

Believe me  arm-twisting by the White House, the World Bank
and the International Monetary Fund is not the socialist revolution, nor
anything remotely like it.

LONDON.  Certain cities are great for aimless wandering. Best of all is Venice.

The poorer faubourgs of Paris still keep a little of their ancient village
character and their proletarian bohemianism, but every year theres less, and
whole neighborhoods have been overwhelmed with Algerians and other immigrants
who have come to France to do the dirty work the French will no longer do. This has resulted in a ghettoization worse than that of the Negro ghettos in
America. Districts like Clignancourt and La Chapelle are closed to the wanderer
by violence and disorder.

London remains one of the places for the person with nothing to do but stroll
for to observe and for to see. I dont mean just romantic ambles along the
Thames Embankment or in the East End along the docks. The latter is pretty well
taken over by warehouses and the Limehouse of Dr. Fu Manchu is gone under the
bombs.

I mean just wandering  in unlikely places, the wastes of Southwark or the
moil of Shepherds Bush. To judge from their books, knowing London was
the favorite sport of the Late Victorian and Edwardian writers  Stevenson, and
his romantic followers like Arthur Machen, but H.G. Wells and the realists as
well, and of course the man who wrote the Iliad and Odyssey of London at the
turn of the century, Conan Doyle.

Smog, noise, confusion, an endless, merciless avalanche of cars roars through
the streets of London today, yet still behind modernity is the old life, lurking
in nooks and crannies.

Tiny shops, out of the way pubs, and dreary rooming houses still harbor the
strange supernumeraries of the dramas of Sherlock Holmes. Yet it has long ceased
to be fashionable amongst writers to know London and I am considered an
oddity by my London colleagues, whose circulation is limited to the West End and
the literary faubourgs  Bloomsbury, Chelsea, Hampstead, Notting Hill, each the
domain of a different generation.

Anyway, after visiting the museums I spent my time in peregrination. Mary did
the shops and decided Way Out London was not as good as Way Out San Francisco
and went back to the museums. Carol did a thorough church-crawl and managed to
see all but a very few of the great City churches, Wren and otherwise.

Ive done the same, not once but several times, and I must say, the massive
impact of a hundred London churches leaves you absolutely convinced that
architecture at its best is the undisputed queen of the arts. I know of no
comparable experience in music or painting, not even Raphaels Stanze or
Tintorettos Scuola di San Rocco  the best comparison is Ravenna, the
purest concentration of great architecture there is.

Carol was disappointed in All-Hallows-Barking-at-the-Tower, which doesnt
live up to the promise of its name, but she was enraptured by the white and gold
splendor of Magnus Martyr, made famous by T.S. Eliot.

St. Clement Danes is on an island in the middle of the Strand and she was
never able to discover how you get through the traffic. Later, friends said the
only way to get to it was to take a taxi.

The traffic may be a nightmare and the food nauseating, but London is my city
and if San Francisco continues to degenerate as it has the past 10 years, thats
where Im going to go.

AMSTERDAM.  I forgot to mention that it rained all the time we were in London
 because I forgot to notice it. Its far from being that famous unnoticeable
Seattle dry rain the Seattleites assure you isnt really there  but if you
notice the weather or the food in the British Isles, youre sunk. Only meteorological Christian Scientists need apply.

But when we got to Amsterdam, winter struck and the weather
became inescapable. After a tour of the sights and a day at the Rijksmuseum and
the modern museum we were prostrated by colds.

Also, we thought wed fool em and eat mostly Indian food in
London and Indonesian food in Amsterdam. I dont think this is wise. Unless you
pay a lot for it I suspect it is no safer than in Madras or Jakarta.

Anyway, we came down doubly.

I should mention that for the benefit of all you eager readers of
modest means. We are trying to better Frommers Europe on $5 a Day. This
is a great work  but its hard to live any cheaper and stay well.

The people of Amsterdam are as ebullient as the Italians or
Greeks and more talkative than the French and as friendly as the English.

Since we couldnt come to Amsterdam, Amsterdam came to us, and
we had visitors from the Provos and the older (like over 23) generation of
Way-Out Amsterdam. Also, we watched the regular Saturday night Provo Happening
go off through the rain to happen  hundreds of Haight-Ashbury type kids,
followed by Our Friendly Police on horses and in paddy wagons. The rain
increased, the happening declined and the police were not provoked.

The Provos are a big subject and I think I will leave them for
another column. Not so spectacular nor so momently notorious, contemporary Dutch
arts and literature are amongst the worlds best  but few other people know
much about them.

What is wrong with the Dutch, as the Dutch are first to tell
you, is Dutch. Fewer people speak it than live in Greater New York and many of
them are Flemish  that is, Belgian nationals, not Dutchmen.

One of the finest modern poets and dramatists is my good friend,
the Flemish Hugo Claus, but although a play and a novel have been translated, he
is unknown in America and I have never been able to persuade any off-Broadway
theater to take a chance on one of his plays. They prefer to stick to the now
utterly standardized Eric Bentley repertory.

Claus had just finished and produced a modern version of the
ancient legend of Thyestes, who ate his own children, but it had come and gone
before we arrived in Amsterdam  though we keep hearing about it from theater
people all over Europe.

If youd like a sample of contemporary Dutch literature,
including some very heated love poems by Claus, get the Busy Bee Reviews New
Dutch Writing and Art, which you should be able to find at City Lights and
such-like bookstores. Harry Mulisch, one of the Netherlands best novelists, is
interviewed in it. He is now, I believe, somewhere in California.

And theres Simon Vinkenoog  who besides being the novelist of
the Dutch subculture of secession is also one of those catalytic people who
leads a generation simply by being a certain kind of directly honest personality
 as well as something of a universal man.

If they are not artists or writers themselves, such people are
usually forgotten  like A.R. Orage, who was a power in London in the twenties
 but if they are creators themselves, like Marcel Duchamp, they become heroes
of an ever-growing legend.

Such, I prophesy, is the future of Simon (everybody calls him by
his first name). He is already the subject of innumerable stories, most of them
modern moral fables, all over Europe. I wish San Francisco State College would
hire him for a year. We need him.

We wandered around the nightbound, fogbound streets of Amsterdam
with the poet Oliver Boelen, a nomad in his own city, as Simon called him.

One of our best visitors was Louis Lehman, archeologist and poet
and critic  who, when he discovered I knew something about prehistoric
archeology, forgot poetry and talked excitedly of stone circles and painted
caves and broken pots. He is another person we could use, teaching in San Francisco.

Yes, Amsterdam is a very jumping place  that toddlin town as the song
called 1925 Chicago.

AMSTERDAM.  This is the first column about the famous Provos of Amsterdam. The
New Youth and their capers have achieved their greatest world press coverage in,
first, Berkeley, second, Haight-Ashbury, third, Amsterdam.

The Provos of Amsterdam have replaced windmills, tulips and
wooden shoes as the leading tourist stereotype of Dutch life.

Outside the San Francisco Bay Area there is certainly no organized movement
of youth as significant. The Provos are most significant for precisely their
organization  which, in comparison with the snake-dancing Left Social
Democratic youth organization of Japan [the Zengakuren], much less with any neo-Bolshevik group,
is no organization at all, but a self-controlled spontaneous continuous
eruption.

Why should this have occurred in the Netherlands and first in Amsterdam?
There are two principal kinds of reasons  remote and proximate, to talk
jargon, or historical and contemporary, the traditions of the past and the
problems of the present.

In the history of radical thought and action, the Netherlands have been as
unconventional and balky as the Pacific coast. When the Comintern was formed, a
delegate said, Comrade Lenin, we shouldnt call this the Communist
International, because there are already Communists in existence. Lenin
replied, Nobody ever heard of them, and when we get through with them, nobody
ever will.

These were the people against whom he wrote Leftism, an Infantile Disorder,
but in that diatribe there is no mention that his opponents had been leaders of
the Rotterdam Soviet, which had held power very efficiently for a few days and
then dissolved itself as premature and without the support of the people  the
most successful and efficient of the temporary seizures of power in the postwar
wave of revolts.

Nor would you know that these leaders were not cranks and ragamuffins from
the bohemian underworld, but Herman Gorter, Hollands leading poet, Anton
Pannekoek, her leading astronomer, Heinrik Grossman, her leading economist.

From that day to this, Dutch radicals have been different. They have not only
been more independent and more intelligent, they have been men who could easily
be and often were successful in other walks of life, mature adults, not the
unemployable over-self-educated lumpen intelligentsia from which most
revolutionary movements recruit their leaders.

Like the radicals of the Pacific coast with their strong individualism
inherited from the IWW, the Dutch, even sometimes Trotskyites like Sneevliet,
who was a far better theoretician than the Old Man [Trotsky],
have always had a tendency to anarchism and syndicalism and a disgust with
politics as usual, Left or Right. This means emphasis on spontaneity, grass roots or shop-roots workers
democracy, organization at the point of production, and a distrust of their own
party and parliamentary bureaucracy.

Why? I dont know. Such attitudes usually grow up in the personal freedom and
economic chaos of a frontier economy. No place could be less a frontier than the
Netherlands. Perhaps this is an instance of opposites producing the same
results.

AMSTERDAM.  This is the second column about the Provos, the Amsterdam youth
movement.

The first thing to understand about the Provos is that they are not political
at all in the sense that term is used by the American left.

Like their San Francisco counterparts, they are anti-political. They are
opposed to the Vietnam war, but they are also opposed to the Cominform and the
Chinintern, to Ho as well as LBJ, and they have developed a remarkable immunity
to Maoist infiltration.

Most of the objectives of Bolshevik and neo-Bolshevik action and propaganda
are simply the objectives of the Foreign Office, the Narkomindel, of Russia or
the Chinese Foreign Ministry. If actions cannot be tied to these objectives they
are suppressed.

Like most of the youth of the world (outside China) the Provos couldnt care
less. They are interested in humane immediate demands, not in geopolitics. They are
interested in changing the quality of life, not in the power of far-off
bureaucrats nor even in economic, wages and hours, or political objectives in
the Netherlands.

The Dutch love life. They in no way resemble the stereotype of the staid
Dutchman. For 600 years they have worked hard at making and keeping a very good
life indeed, there in their sea marshes.

It was a life that worked surprisingly well, a masterpiece of what Toynbee
calls meeting the challenge of hard conditions. Those hard conditions were
imposed by nature.

Suddenly this life has been struck a series of violent blows by new hard
conditions, man-made this time.

Society may be affluent but in few cities has the man-made environment
deteriorated as badly as in Amsterdam. It is structurally not a city which can
cope with the uncontrolled technology of the new society because it is
structurally so perfectly adjusted to the old. It is the old story of the new
order struggling for birth in the womb of the old.

What are the principal demands of the Provos? Control all automobile traffic
and get the autos out of the old city altogether. Restore all the canals as
traffic ways. Stop the pollution of both air and water now, by immediately
effective drastic measures. Make birth control information and devices freely
available to everybody.

Whats wrong with this? Im for it all in San Francisco. The remarkable thing
is that so is almost everybody in Amsterdam, including the Dutch Catholic
leaders. The Provos have become not just the voice of youth, but the irrepressible
spokesmen for everybody  everybody with any sort of social conscience or sense
of what makes for a decent humane community life.

So much for the overall picture  the external relations of the Provo
movement. One more column soon on the internal, subjective life  what are the
Provos amongst themselves?

BERLIN. Whenever I have spent a season museum crawling in Europe I have
emerged with the feeling, Art is a failure. Not only are there miles and
miles of walls lined with mediocre paintings which are the old-time analogs of
our fugitive commercial illustration, but there are hundreds of painters of
reputation who really arent any good.

More important, there are inordinately ambitious painters, like
Michelangelo, who try to force painting to do things it cant and whose failures
are catastrophic.

Leonardo knew he was too much for art, which is why he never
finished his most ambitious paintings and is greatest when solving purely
technical problems, as in The Virgin of the Rocks.

Only Tintoretto ever managed to combine great intellectual power
and a command of all the resources of painting in a way that permitted him to
completely express himself.

I thought of this the other day when I came away from a visit to
Nefertiti in Berlins Dahlem Museum and noticed that my eyes were full of tears.
I know all about it  that it is decadent; that it is not truly sculptural but
linear  so linear in fact that it was perhaps the principal influence on
Aubrey Beardsley; that it is only a workshop studio model, a formula to be used
for other sculpture; that this formula is as extreme an example of the
sentimentalization of female beauty as Bronzinos Mannerist portraits of the
chic world of declining Florence.

Yet it is a perfect example of the achievement of a completely
satisfying and deeply moving work of art by someone who was not trying for a
world-shaking masterpiece.

Marcel Proust said that the little yellowish rectangle on the
wall in Vermeers street scene was the greatest achievement in all painting.
This is very precious and very Proust, but it is certainly true that what makes
Vermeer so great, so profound if you will, is his transparent modesty. True,
there is nothing in Mondrian that isnt first in Vermeer. Structurally he is
perhaps the purest and most subtle of all painters. But structure isnt
everything, which is why the creaking architecture of Poussin is such a bore.

Vermeer, De Hooch, Terborch (who, I was taught, was just a
painter of velvet), Sandredaams crystalline church interiors, how much more
successful these painters are than Rembrandt or Rubens!

And who stands head and shoulders above all other French
painters prior to the 19th century? Chardin, who doubtless couldnt spell
gloire and who confined himself to the kitchen and to good children doing
quiet things.

As you come in the modern museum in Amsterdam there is a ground
floor gallery off to the side which you might miss. It contains the work of the
Dutch Der Stijl group  Mondrian, Van Doesberg, Vantangerloo and their
friends, and the largest collection of the Russian Suprematist, Malevich, known
to exist.

Upstairs there are rooms full of Van Gogh, who, for all his
violent spiritual ambitions, the years have shown to be primarily a decorator.
There are examples of all the standard modernists, and then rooms full of simply
dreadful noisy contemporary art, Pop, Op and Slop.

Besides being so much more successful than contemporary abstract
painting, Mondrians colored tiles and Malevichs White on White are so
more moral. Here, you feel, are painters who simply tried hard to do what they
had to do and never deluded themselves or others.

Contemporary art can be simply defined as painting by painters
who believe the nonsense written by their dealers publicity men.

One of the curious things about Dutch painting is the big gap,
almost 200 years, in modern times. Probably there is a 19th and early 20th
century collection somewhere in Amsterdam which shows more Dutch painting than
does the Stadlijkmuseum, but we were ill with flu and trots and it was raining
and bitterly cold, so we never found it.

I remember half a lifetime of seeing Dutch painters in
international annuals like the Carnegie. What happened to all these people? The
only one left is Campendonk, very well represented in the Stadlijkmuseum.

I wonder about those big eyes he was so fond of. Can we lay
Walter Keane at the doors of Campendonk and Marie Laurencin?

I have been rambling on like this because I believe that the art
of the last hundred years is due, overdue, for a total revaluation.

As the first generation to grow up in a world of nuclear reactors, computers
and automation, the Provos are concerned with harnessing this new technology and
preventing it from dehumanizing the environment and destroying the great virtues
inherent or potential in the community of Amsterdam. After all  they are the
people who will be operating the technological society for the rest of the
century, and as they enter upon adulthood, their first demand is that this
technology be harnessed so they can ride it. At present it has yet to be broken
to bit and saddle.

In their relations with one another, in their lives as Provos together, what
are they like?

They are very like the permanent residents of San Franciscos Haight-Ashbury
community. Like that community, they have their bums and lunatic fringe, but
though they are most conspicuous they are least important.

What long ago I called the movement to optional dress has spread far beyond
the Provos to most Dutch youth and people go about in flowered trousers, long
hair or shaved heads, 19th-century army dress tunics, everything except togas.

The actual Provos, perhaps to distinguish themselves, tend to be more
conservatively dressed  in white jeans and white T-shirts or other simple and
usually very clean garb. Although like the rebel youth of most of the world, the
Provos have discarded alcohol for marijuana as a mild social intoxicant, they
arent very obsessive about it, and still less are they hung up on pills and
acid. They are militantly anti-cigarettes. They may use LSD betimes, but unlike
the American psychedellies, they dont bore you to death talking about it.
However, they do share with the LSD cult and with Allen Ginsberg a vociferous
I love everybody approach to, well, everybody. That includes support your
friendly Amsterdam police  with a relentless campaign of nonviolent teasing
which seems to have the fuzz beside itself.

Every Saturday night there is a happening  they use the English word,
as they use English and American songs and often speak English among
themselves. These happenings are a kind of dadaist mass demonstration against,
each time, some patent community evil.

The fuzz go on filling the paddy wagons with kids who have just laid 100
fried eggs and 100 rotten oranges on the steps of the Royal Palace, and the
Amsterdamers stand around and cheer. They want the Royal House of Orange to give
up the Palace and turn it into a cultural center.

Personal  or interpersonal  intimate life among the Provos is remarkably
free  free of tensions, obsessions, guilt and emotional exploitation. Their
ethic of philosophical anarchism obviously works. Just as Quakers seem to have less trouble practicing the impossibilist
ethic of Christianity, so the Provos practice mutual aid, mutual respect,
total freedom, inviolable integrity, just by doing what comes naturally.

What is this new society in the shell of the old they have created? It is the
society of the technological age  when naked exploitation of labor power is no
longer the necessary basis of the economy and when man needs no longer be wolf
to man. They have simply walked into it without asking permission. In 2000 AD
well all be in it or well all be dead.

WEST BERLIN.  One week last month the British, then the German, then the
Brazilian, then the Japanese, then the American, heads of state or the fiscal
authorities, took their constituents to task for spending too much money on city
expenses. They said if such goings on continued to go on, thered be
inflation for sure.

What goes on? Does Walt Rostow sit in some secret den in the
White House, think these things up, pass them on to the Great White Father, who
in turn shoots them out to all his vassals by Telstar?

This is the kind of nonsense for which the accepted term is
egregious. Honest now, Walt, do you really think youre kidding anybody?

What do local authorities spend money on? Aircraft carriers?
Proven boondoggles like the CIA? Crop subsidies?

Indeed not. Most all municipal money goes directly to the
necessary services of city life, to capital structures or to wages for concrete
services.

What is causing the American inflation that is endangering the
entire economy of the post-War II boom, all over the world? Is it too high wages
for school teachers? Is it too many sewers? Maybe it is too many policemen? Too
much high-priced tar in the asphalt?

If the Chinese make steel in their back yards, why cant we
dispose of our garbage in ours? A compost heap in every home and save the
dollar, the mark, the yen and the cruzeiro, say I.

Of course local authority housing is pure galloping communism,
and fortunately we dont have much of it. But the British and the Germans have
got to stop it, or the pound and mark wont be worth tinkers dams.

You know what a tinkers dam is, dont you? Everybody who ever
listened to a quiz show knows that. Its a little piece of lead the tinker puts
around a hole to hold in the solder. If you go on paying schoolteachers and
public health nurses those outrageous salaries, the solder will all run away and
therell be nothing left but the hole.

Or is it all a plot? Do you really suppose J. Edgar Hoover is
going to take over all the police departments in the U.S.A. and in that
ingenious way save us from another 1929? Gee, hes a smart fellow. Who ever
would have thought of so simple a solution to the mysteries of capitalism?
Simpler, but much like Karl Marxs

No more parks, no more sewers, no more sidewalks, no more
streets, no new schools, no new hospitals, and the economy will deflate by
Christmas. Contracts for such things are set years in advance. Well, there must
be something in it, if Walt Rostow told Johnson the Second and he told all those
other important people.

I dont know very much about economics. Im going to have to go
back and read those epoch-making books of Walts  really study them this time.

WEST BERLIN.  For a couple of months now I have been promising myself I would
do a summation of my experiences visiting practically every important museum in
Germany, my own revaluation of 20th-century German painting.

All you have to do
is visit a comprehensive collection of pre-20th-century German painting, like
the one in Schloss Charlottenberg in Berlin, to be convinced that the Germans
hate the human eye.

They simply cant see, or if they can, they do it in some
fashion unknown to any of the humans who have made the great tradition of
painting and sculpture  whether Chinese, Africans, Egyptians, Italians,
Frenchmen.

Of course there is Durer, but for centuries Durer is all there
is. His watercolors and drawings are great, but compare him with someone like
Rogier Van Der Weyden and you see that there is still in him much of the
otherwise universal error of German plastic perception. German painting is good
only when it recognizes this defect, attacks it and overcomes it.

Munich and Düsseldorf were major
centers of art education throughout the 19th century. That is what is wrong with
much, especially American, 19th-century painting. But it is obvious, once you
return to the sources, the room of that period in those cities, that unlike
subtle wines, this stuff was greatly improved by traveling. The American
students are better than their German masters. There are few paintings to be
found in Germany as good as the Hudson River School.

Even more startling is the
improvement that America wrought in the Germans themselves. Half the
painters of the Old West were Germans, and they did uniformly better work in the
States than they did at home. Nowhere in the Old Country will you
find a painting to compare with Yosemite with Man Killing Grizzly, much
less with The Talking Wire, one of the greatest anecdotal paintings of
the 19th century  almost as good as The Last of England.

Just now, with the overwhelming
demand of the affluent society, dealers are combing through the storerooms they
have inherited from their grandfathers and launching discoveries, usually after
they have cornered all available paintings by the discovered painter.

Recent examples have been the
Klimpt and Scheele revivals  both certainly painters worth reviving. Few
artists of the Renaissance were as sumptuous as Klimpt and no one will ever
paint again the beautiful, overcivilized very free and very rich women of
Viennas Jewish aristocracy.

Egon Scheele is more successfully
erotic than Boucher or Aubrey Beardsley, Félicien Rops or Fuselli. The painters
who surpass Scheele, like Tintoretto and Tiepolo, sought a different, more noble
eroticism.

Just now there is a Lovis Corinth revival under way, and there
was a comparable show of his work in San Francisco last year. I think this is
pure merchandising, for I think he is just awful.

On the other hand, there is a painter who has become very hard
to find even in Germany, who as recently as 50 years ago was still considered
Germanys leading modern artist, and who is badly in need of reviving. This is
Hans Thoma.

His landscapes resemble our Inness, but are more substantial,
and his portraits are somewhat like the better pre-Raphaelites, particularly
Ford Madox Brown  who was no mean painter. He stands at the far end of
Jugenstil, Art Nouveau, in some work, his later landscapes especially.

I was glad to read that there was a show of the work of
Christian Rohlfs in San Francisco. This is a painter, even more a draftsman, of
great delicacy and pathos, only now beginning to be properly appreciated in
Germany. He is their analog of the French intimistes Bonnard and
Vuillard, and his paintings are always rectangles of lucidity in the midst of
his turgid contemporaries.

Another painter I greatly like is August Macke, killed in youth
in the First World War. Macke is exquisitely sensitive and his color
organization in space owes much to Seurat, the later Renoir and Robert Delaunay,
but it is always unmistakably his own.

It is Mackes highly individual sensibility that makes him,
however. The fluent colors and prismatic volumes may be unmistakable as far as
you can see the canvas, but more telling is his ability to capture the exact
grace of refined femininity as it came to flower in the days just before the
lights went out over Europe.

Think  born in 1887, dead in 1914, under the first guns. He
might well be alive today, and he would have made all the difference in German
art. Only he and Klee are completely civilized men.

The mistake was made when Augustus decided not to push the Roman
line to the Elbe. The later years produce little. Only Baumeister and Winter
stand up against Paris, and, after the war, against New York or San Francisco or
Seattle.

WEST BERLIN.  As everybody who reads the papers must know by now, the contrast
between East and West Germany, and most especially East and West Berlin, is more
than startling or shocking.

It is hard to believe that these were once parts of the same
country with the same traditions, economic history, social development. It is a
difference in kind, not in degree, like the difference between Mexico and the
United States.

In that last statement is concealed the answer to the question
that bothered me for months, Where does the surplus value go? What happens
to the profits from East German enterprises?

It is easy to say that it is all drained off to Russia through
forced manipulation of the market relations between the ruling and the vassal
country.

That was true in the years after the war when Russia itself was
rebuilding from the ruins and exploiting an East Germany forced to work for the
conqueror amidst its own ruins.

This was a period something like War Communism in Russia in the
days of the shattered economic structure and social chaos of the Civil War  in
1919-1924.

Western Europe, aided by the Marshall Plan, was recovering by
1949; it took the Iron Curtain countries another five years or so. That puts the
end of a dragooned economy back almost half a generation.

Why has East German recapitalization lagged so shockingly behind
the miracle of West Germany? All you have to do is look at the factories,
and the infrastructure  the capitalization of public life, roads, housing,
schools, hospitals, that go to make for an efficiently productive social
mechanism  to see that the profits to be expected from what was once the most
productive country on earth short of the U.S.A. did not go to the plant  to
capitalization, even to the degree that they have in Russia, Poland, or
Czechoslovakia.

Where did they go? They just as obviously didnt go to the
workers. Clothing is poor and expensive. Simple foods are cheap, but imported
luxuries like coffee are very dear. There are paid vacations, social security,
medical care, theater tickets, sports and gymnastics for everybody  the Scout
Camp cultural amenities that are part of life under Bolshevik regimes.

Housing is still in short supply, although recently East Berlin
has been filling up the old devastated areas with standardized public housing at
very low rents.

Yet perhaps the majority of the working class live in the prewar
flats, in the old working class districts, still with inadequate plumbing and
poor heating. The best housing goes to the technical workers and the
intellectuals and the bureaucracy.

Even so  labor is in such short supply that the future tenants
work on their time off on the apartments they are going to occupy.

Only in the last two or three years has East Germany loosened up
and begun to overtake the great economic surge forward of Poland, Hungary and
Czechoslovakia.

Even more recently the revolution in planning, factory
organization, accounting, and technical economics that has been shaking even
Bulgaria and Rumania, has at last come to East Germany.

What was going on in the meantime? What held the country back so
long? I will try to give you my ideas of an answer in the next column.

WEST BERLIN.  The best way to understand what has occurred in the Iron
Curtain countries in the last 20 years is to start off with a clear definition
of Bolshevism.

Bolshevism is not communism or even socialism in any sense in which those
words were understood before 1918. It is a very primitive form of state
capitalism. It is a method of forcing a backward, semi-colonial country through
the period of capital accumulation which the major capitalist nations went
through in the early years of the 19th century.

To accumulate an industrial capital structure from within an agricultural
economy requires such a degree of exploitation of the peasantry and working
class that no modern people is prepared to accept it without wholesale coercion.

Bolshevism is not a social system which occurs after the society described in
Marxs Capital has passed away; it is an artificially constructed
resurrection of the society described at the beginning of that book.

The Bolsheviks have established themselves in common opinion as great Left
theoreticians. They were not. They were reactionary right wingers in all the
disputes of the pre-War I socialist movement.

Their real contribution was a theory of power, how to prepare for it, how to
seize it, how to hold it, all ideologies and principles regardless.

It is important to understand this background or it is impossible to
understand what happened in the Iron Curtain countries after the Second War.

Due to its theoretical poverty, and the vulgarity of its leaders, Bolshevism
had proven itself an extremely inefficient method of primitive accumulation
by the time the Second War broke out.

But if Bolshevism didnt work well in the semi-colonial country where it was
evolved, what happened when it was applied to what had been in many ways the
most highly developed economy on earth  to Dresden, Leipzig and East Berlin?

The industrial complex may have been shattered, but it was far from
destroyed, and in detail it was superior to anything elsewhere on the continent.

True, in the first years, the Russians hauled away everything that could be
moved, especially machine tools. But proportionately this damage has been
greatly exaggerated.

For 15 years an inefficient system for ruling a very backward economy,
standing at the beginning of capitalism, was superimposed on one of the most
advanced economies. This led to hopeless, incurable, constantly nagging contradictions all along
the line.

Where did the surplus value that should have gone into
recapitalization go? It didnt go anywhere, it didnt come into existence. The economy of a
Stalinized East Germany simply ran at a dead loss. The milking of German
production by Russian trade agreements was not determinative. After all, the
German economy was milked by the victors, especially the French, under the
Versailles reparations, but this did not prevent Weimar Germany from
outstripping both France and England in rate of growth, and that in an
atmosphere of continuous financial crisis.

[December 29, 1966]

“San Francisco Fifty Years Ago” is an ongoing project of posting
all of Kenneth Rexroth’s columns for the San Francisco Examiner
(1960-1967). Each of the columns is being
posted on the 50th anniversary of its original appearance. Copyright 1960-1967 Kenneth Rexroth.
Reproduced here by permission of the Kenneth Rexroth Trust.